A new legal filing alleges that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers at Trump Tower and the White House in order to connect Donald Trump to Russia.
Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion in February that focused on “potential conflicts of interest related to the representation of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann,” reported Fox News.
Sussmann has been charged with making a false statement to a federal agent and has pleaded not guilty.
He allegedly told the FBI he was not working on behalf of Clinton when he presented “purported data and ‘white papers’ that allegedly demonstrated a covert communications channel” between the Trump Organization and a Kremlin-tied bank.
Durham’s filing on Feb. 11 alleged Sussmann “had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including a technology executive (Tech Executive 1) at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign”.
It also said Sussmann’s “billing records reflect” that he “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations”.
Durham states that “Tech Executive-1 tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia”.
it was also revealed that, in 2017, Sussmann provided “an updated set of allegations” involving the Russian bank data and other allegations relating to Trump “to a second agency of the U.S. government”.
The allegations “relied, in part, on the purported DNS traffic” that was “assembled pertaining to Trump Tower, Donald Trump’s New York City apartment building, the EOP, and the aforementioned healthcare provider”.
Durham says Sussmann “provided data which he claimed reflected purportedly suspicious DNS lookups by these entities of internet protocol (IP) addresses affiliated with a Russian mobile phone provider”.
He claimed the lookups “demonstrated Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations”.
“The Special Counsel’s Office has identified no support for these allegations,” Durham said, noting that the “lookups were far from rare in the United States”.
Former President Trump responded to the filing Saturday, saying it “provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia”.
“This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution,” Trump said. “In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death”.
“In addition, reparations should be paid to those in our country who have been damaged by this,” he concluded.
Rep. Kash Patel, who was chief investigator of the House’s probe into Trump’s alleged Russian ties, told Fox News that the filing was “definitive” evidence that Clinton’s campaign organized “a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia”.